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Sky City 1000

Sky City 1000
Tokyo's proposed Sky City 1000
General information
Status Vision
Type Hotel, office, residential
Location Tokyo, Japan
Roof 1,000 m (3,300 ft)
Technical details
Floor count 196[1]
Floor area 8 km2
Design and construction
Architect Takenaka Corporation

Sky City 1000 is a hypothetical architectural project - specifically, a skyscraper envisioned in the Tokyo metropolitan area. It was announced in 1989 during the height of the Japanese asset price bubble.

The plan consists of a building 1,000 metres (3,281 ft) tall and 400 m (1,312 ft) wide at the base, and a total floor area of 8 km2 (3.1 sq mi).[2] The design, proposed in 1989 by Takenaka Corporation, would house between 35,000[2][3] and 36,000[4] full-time residents, as well as 100,000 workers. It comprises 14 concave dish-shaped "Space Plateaus" stacked one upon the other. The interior of the plateaus would contain greenspace, and on the edges, on the sides of the building, would be the apartments. Also included in the building would be offices, commercial facilities, schools, theatres, and other modern amenities.[2]

Since its announcement, it has garnered a lot of attention from the world's architectural establishment, and was featured on Discovery Channel's Extreme Engineering in 2003.

Land prices in Japan were the highest in the world at the time, and Kisho Kurokawa, one of Japan's most famous architects, has said that staggeringly ambitious buildings employing highly sophisticated engineering are still cheap, because companies pay 90% of the cost for the land and only 10% for the building.[5] Tokyo's only fire helicopter has even been used in simulation tests to see what the danger would be if a fire were to break out in the building.[2] Triple-decker high speed elevators which would be used in the building are also being designed in labs outside Tokyo.[2]

Although this project has gained more serious attention than many of its alternatives, it can be considered similar to projects as X-Seed 4000 and to ultra-high density, mixed use concepts such as Paolo Soleri's Arcology and Le Corbusier's Ville Radieuse.

If completed, Sky City 1000 would be the tallest man-made structure in the world, edging out the Burj Khalifa in Dubai. However, Kingdom Tower, currently under construction, is planned to be taller.

See also


  1. ^ Sky City 1000 - SkyscraperPage
  2. ^ a b c d e Sky City 1000 - Emporis
  3. ^ Discovery Channel :: Extreme Engineering: Sky City
  4. ^ SKY CITY 1000
  5. ^ Cities in the sky: New Scientist, October 2, 1993
